The story of Orpheus, the greatest musician in the world, braving Hades to sing for the release of his beloved Eurydice, fatally snake-bitten on their wedding day, and of their ascent together, allowed on the famous condition that he neither speak to nor look at her before once again attaining the upper world, has held the Western imagination like no other Greek myth, save, possibly, Oedipus. “Orpheus and Eurydice” is for her. I would love to know who else you are reading. We’ve used them as recently as this morning, in front of the post office or the grocery store. Milosz poetry is intelligible, a requisite for me, and his voice speaks to his belief that there is some power outside of and greater than any of us. behind you. I just texted Sam, my partner, to tell him I received a comment from a man in his eighties who, because of Milosz, fell in love with poetry. ……… We know sidewalks. Hello Madhav, And so Hermes brought forth Eurydice. For me also, I feel I’ve signed up with all of your. He felt strongly his life with its guilt This is rhetorically very close to Beckett’s “You must go on. Under thousands of frozen centuries, Orpheus hunched in a gust of wind For his defense he had a nine-stringed lyre. It is not him doing the crying. Of his having composed his words always against death I can’t go on. Electronic dogs passed him noiselessly. Unable to weep, he wept at the loss He carried in it the music of the earth, against the abyss The slap of the god’s sandals and the light patter Of her guide. He felt the rhythm of his blood. Became, like his lyre, its instrument. What a gift! Thanks. Life shifts and has facet.”. Thank you, amright, for stopping by to read my post. It is a comparatively well-educated group which assembles here, but the number of times I’ve seen a volume of poetry on someone’s table, if rendered as a temperature, would freeze interstellar particles. Please stop back by to continue the conversation! Of course, many other poets as well, many of them introduced by him. Copyrighted poems are the property of the copyright holders. In memorial to her, he wrote “On Parting with My Wife, Janina”. Her eyelids lowered beneath the shade of her lashes. Our right to distance from the ensuing drama has been revoked. The second poem of Graham's I have read. It will take you six or seven minutes to read it. Here is the poem in its entirety. And yet, a careful scan of the poem turns up not one mention of it. Persephone, in her garden of withered pear and apple trees, Tossed the leaves of the trees. A biographical note is in order here: Milosz survived the death of two deeply loved wives. Milosz has written that what made his era basically different from any other was the motion picture, and his poem all but flickers with the silver screen’s influence: It opens on a noir-like night – fog, wind tearing at a coat and tossing leaves, headlights flaring and dimming. What better, for him and for us, than to know that such a journey is possible. But they had lost the ability to remember David: Thank you for your felicitous note. His reply: “There’s something so deep about discovering a passion later. These are the latitudes inhabited by Verdi’s Falstaff, Mozart’s Requiem, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and —Milosz’s “Orpheus and Eurydice”. Aristaeus is inserted into the poem to emphasize the natural human flaw of furor, public display of anger. And in the sky white clouds. His lyre was silent, yet he dreamed, defenseless. Dare I say I’m writing a little poetry also. He turned his head too soon. Then: Under his faith a doubt sprang up --now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be recalled,now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be taken in,(somewhere the castle above the river)(somewhere you holding this piece of paper)(what will you do next?) mountains, Holy-sweet as a sea of incense, under the low dark crimson skies: Glad were the glens where Eurydice bathed, in the beauty of dawn, at the. Does anything in particular strike you? "Eurydice shall follow you, to the gates, But there is a condition, by it you must abide, Should you look behind, to see Eurydice, Before upon you, the rays of light fall, You shall lose her forever" Patience, they say, is a rare possession, and Orpheus was no exception, Walking ahead, on their final tread, Orpheus tried to hear, Eurydice's steps, Sorry for taking so long to respond. But once in a while, proximity to death seems to lift an artist to a place beyond where he or she has ever been. Are you much acquainted with Czeslaw Milosz? Exciting. The first, Janina, died in 1986. He puts Persephone on an amethyst throne in a garden of withered pear and apple trees, and one can almost sense a slow Tarkovskyian track through the grove of blackened trunks. He sang of smoking water in the rose-colored daybreaks, I assume that what whoever said this about Milosz meant was that, not only did his poetic faculty deepen, but that he took on age as a subject in itself and said things about it that had not been said before.